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FOOD: Getting to the Source, an interview with Cory Schreiber

by Deborah Z. Lee

“I knew that long before I did Farm to School, that if you’re going to educate children about food, you need to get them to the source.” Online at http://www.theportlandalliance.org/food and in the June Alliance!

Cory Schreiber is a familiar name in the Portland area, particularly in the food world, when he was Chef-Owner of the highly regarded Wildwood restaurant in NW Portland. During those years, he was awarded Best Chef – Pacific Northwest by the James Beard Foundation in 1998. It’s fitting he was bestowed an award named for a man whose food philosophy he shared: a reverence for food prepared from local and regional ingredients, of which he writes in Wildwood, a personal family history of food and a cookbook. In a second book, he collaborated with Pastry Chef Julie Richardson on Rustic Fruit Desserts. Both books are splendid volumes of completely different aspects of food preparation, culture, and history, resplendent with recipes. But Chef Schreiber’s accomplishments didn’t stop there. After leaving Wildwood, he headed up the Farm to School program for the Department of Agriculture. He also founded a nonprofit, Sauvie Island Center, with four others. Now a Chef-Instructor at The Art Institute of Portland, he teaches a lecture class on Purchasing, Sustainability, and Controlling Costs; and a hands-on kitchen lab class,
Classic European Cuisine. We caught up with Chef Schreiber between classes at Sharp, the school’s restaurant.

DL: How did you transition from chef-owner of Wildwood to heading up the Farm to School program for the Dept. of Ag; did they call you and say, “Come work with us to develop this program,” or was it already in place?

CS: It was a new job for the Oregon Dept of Ag, and that’s, I think, the first job they’ve created in at least over 10 years, if not 20. They have a very rigorous posting of jobs, acceptance of hundreds of applications, and I was filtered into the final 10 applications, so I went through the same process everybody else did. I was brought in for an interview, and I think it was partly because of my reputation with food that helped me get the job, but also because of the way I approached school food, realizing it was more about not changing menus, not changing formats, but just kind of changing where the food was coming from. I think some people felt they wanted to change the whole school food system, which is, I think, next to impossible, but I spoke more about enhancing it with local, and I think that’s what they really were looking to do, because the premise for funding those jobs is that they bring more money to Oregon Ag. The idea is that the State of Oregon ideally could take 10, 15, 20 percent of those dollars and bring it in to farms within our state boundary, which is not usually the case with school food. It’s usually dominated by commodities. The most local thing on school lunch menus is milk. It goes far away from Oregon after you get past the milk. So, that was, that is still to this day, four years later, what they are actually making great strides in doing.

DL: That’s good. I saw the Jamie Oliver programs as he tried to change the school lunch menus in a town in West Virginia. I don’t know if he used local farms, but the idea was to get less of the processed food off the menu.

CS: It’s very popular, what they put on television, but I think the point in Oregon is we’re really trying to have financial examples that state the benefits. In order for Farm to School to work, it needs to be situated and proposed as economic growth for farms. If it’s people like Jamie Oliver trying to bring attention to it, it’s not that effective ultimately because it doesn’t give the government actual numbers to work with to say that these foods in schools should be economic benefit to the state that oversee the programs. And it is all done state-by-state. Sometimes by the Dept of Ed, sometimes by the Dept. of Ag, it depends on the state.

DL: It’s discouraging, because what you’re saying is that what Jamie Oliver did didn’t do any good.

CS: Well, it pays to inform the public, but he didn’t help the people making the decisions. They’re dealing with a different set of really tough circumstances. The problem with Farm to School is that it’s an easy one for everyone to point their finger and say that “I didn’t really like my school lunch.” If some of those people were to go down to Biloxi, Mississippi, and stand in line for school lunch, they’d have a different idea of what it means for some people to get a free lunch who actually can’t afford it. I think Farm to School has been glorified to a great extent, it’s been misinterpreted, on kind of the level of media, the level of attention, but remember that half the lunches that go out are paid for by the federal government, and another 20 percent are partially funded by the government. So for a lot of kids it’s the only meal they can count on; and that’s the part of the picture that a lot of people are missing.

DL: Was the Edible Schoolyard [a program developed by Alice Waters] used as a model for Farm to School?

CS: What’s currently happening is that -- I have a brother-in-law who is heading up something called Food Corps, and Food Corps has a mandate for the federal government helping out with funding Food Corps, which is a little bit like AmeriCorps. So you have post-college-age students who are paid about $15,000 a year to go work in a school as an assistant, but it is mandatory that they have gardening skills as well as cooking skills. So when you ask the question, is the Edible Schoolyard a model, the answer is yes, because that clearly was a model based upon growing the food and bringing it into the kitchen. It is used as a model because that’s the model that suggests that kids do better, their temperament is more even, and maybe even feasibly, their scoring on tests is higher when they’re eating foods that they know where it comes from, and it’s considered, dare I use the word, more nutritious. So that’s why that model exists, because in order to make any of this work, there has to be scientific proof that by improving the food quality and the nutrition, you will actually be improving the sum of the students in educational benefits. It’s a good model, it’s financed very heavily by the James Beard Foundation, which makes it possible for everybody to have Berkeley in their backyard; but it still works as a model for the rest of the country to refer to, and have to build examples around.

DL: Was it satisfying to you to be able to use the farmer and grower connections that you’ve sustained over the years at Wildwood?

CS: Well, processors, yes. But not farmers as much, because the farmers that I was dealing with in the high-end restaurant are very different from the farmers that want to sell bulk foods to schools in increments of 100s of pounds of units. Economically, there’s a comparison, but quality-wise and relationship-wise, I wasn’t able to connect the dots on that one, necessarily. I mean, I attempted it, but nothing ever transformed. I think it’s two different worlds, purchasing food, two economic bases. And value bases, too.

DL: In the movie, Ingredients, you were shown with a group of kids. Did you have much contact with kids at all in the Farm to School program?

CS: No; when the film Ingredients showed my activity out there, I also was the Farm to School coordinator for the Dept of Ag, but I was doing something that I previously established. The Sauvie Island Center is the educational center on Sauvie Island tied to Sauvie Island Organics and that was the nonprofit that I started about three years before I took the Farm to School job. So that was back in 2005. And so Sauvie Island Center was Sherry Raider, who was the founder of Sauvie Island Organics, and myself, and three other people, started that. That’s a six-year-old project that I helped to raise money for, I was a board member, I used Portland State University students on their final nonprofit business equations about the business plan for that. That was really where the work was done to make the kid-to-farmer connection. I knew that long before I did Farm to School, that if you’re going to educate children about food, you need to get them to the source. Sauvie Island Center runs about 1400 kids a year out to the farm. Field trips take place in the fall and in the spring, and then they go out there and spend the day. They learn about compost, they learn about forest, field, they learn about farming; about wildlife, and the importance about habitat when on the farms, water, trees; so there’s a lot of ecology tied into it.

DL: In your Purchasing and Sustainability class here, what is the single most important thing you want your students to come away with after taking the class?

CS: In the class they have to pay attention to the cost of food in accordance with food cost projections, which gives them selling prices, so you can’t ballpark the whole menu; you actually have to break it down ingredient by ingredient, know the cost of those ingredients and know how they add back up again to meet a recipe. And that’s something to walk away with. Understanding how to arrive at a selling price, based on the cost of goods. A little bit of work that goes into knowing how to convert things, like if you look at beverages, if a keg has 15.5 gals in it, then how many pints do you get out of it, how much to sell a pint of beer for, know how to convert from gallons to ounces, a keg has so many ounces, divided by 16, how many pints do you get. So there’s conversions, there’s menu costing, and then we spend a lot of time on eco labels, first, second, and third-party certification, understanding how food is a natural resource before it is ecology-based.
   We had a guest speaker this year from Carp Resources who talked a lot about what they call triple bottom line. Triple bottom line is a term we’re seeing a little bit in the food world where operators not only consider profit, but consider social equity, and environmental impact. So triple bottom line is a little different than just bottom line, period, meaning profit. You’re talking about social equity in terms of labor and benefits. And about impact on environment in purchasing in terms of how far something travels; how many food miles are involved; we talk about understanding monoculture; we talk about understanding food insecurity, which is translated to understanding: is quality offered to every economic class.

DL: When someone takes the class, how could they apply that to their life, not necessarily opening a restaurant, but in their renewed outlook after taking the class?

CS: Some of the feedback we hear from students after they take the class is when they walk into a grocery store, they don’t look at it the same anymore. They begin to break it down and think about carbon footprint, how far the food traveled, how it’s labeled, and they also think about how much it cost; and begin to wonder what their markups are. They also think about where it comes from.

DL: Do you think most students prefer that their food is local, or organic, after taking this class?

CS: As a teacher it’s hard to tell. I don’t know whether they’re telling me what I want to hear, because they think it’ll affect their grade, or whether they’re telling me something they really learned; I don’t know. I think one of the problems about the class is that the people that take the class are a long ways away from being in positions of being buyers. So by the time they’re able to buy one ten hundred million whatever dollars worth of food a year or whatever they’re doing, this will all be faint in their minds, most likely. We don’t know the impact. I can’t measure the impact five terms into this. It’s hard for me to tell. I would like to think the impact is moderate, if not heavy, for changing ways students look at purchasing food. It used to be one-stop shopping for me as an apprentice, I never thought about where the food came from, I’d just go to the storeroom, fill out the requisition sheet, and come back. I know one of the things the class does is it shows the complexity of the food system, the complexity of how easily things can travel, how anything and everything is available to us; but how do we make our decisions about which of those items do we want.
   I don’t know if you have people who are kind of forecasting the future of the local food movement, is it going to stay, is it going to go away. I think that’s a question for people.

DL: No, I don’t think it’s going to go away. We’re too famous, especially for the food carts. And, you know, with people like you that have had such a history here and you’ve stayed to see it through, and it’s exciting for people coming through the school to have someone to look up to. I think there’s a lot here to be done, and that’s already being done, and has been done, and restaurants that have opened – and closed – but people still keep opening them.

CS: Yeah. That’s one of the things, aside from the Farm to School, the thing about working from an advantage, was that I had access to a lot of information. And something to me was curious about statistics about what’s growing in Oregon. We have 250 commodity foods. We have 26 commodity commissions. States like Iowa and Ohio have two or three. So we have great diversity in this state. That’s a big deal, to have commissions. I mean, not all of it’s edible. There’s a Christmas tree commission, and a grass seed commission, and a nursery commission. But the other thing that’s happening is that, actually, small farms in Oregon, the ones that really keep the food in the state, right? -- are on the rise. We do export 90% of our food out of the state. So, you could argue and say, well what if all the schools used only local food? Is that 90% going to be 80%? And then you have the question of value. Right now, for example, the price of Dungeness crab price is going up because the demand in China is so large for it, it’s rubbing up against indigenous species in China for crab. They’re preferring the Dungeness crab. So when crabbing people here can sell the food for more to a distant market, they’ll always go to the higher bidder. Same thing with mushrooms, same thing with salmon, same thing with Oregon truffles. They’re always going to be sold across the border. So, you don’t always want that export margin to go down, because it’s better for the people providing the exported goods. When I bring up the small farms, I say it’s good that they’re on rise, because the small farms are the ones that keep the food local; not the large ones. So that’s a good thing. I’m not a big statistics person, but I find that when you’re talking about these topics, people listen when you talk about growth of industry.

DL: Do you think the restaurant industry is a growing industry here, the food service industry?

CS: Yeah. People are actually eating out more. The only difference is, it’s diversified into supermarkets, for example. Now you can get quality meals in supermarkets. Ten years ago, that wouldn’t have crossed your mind. Foods to go. Hot woks, salad bars, noodle bars; you just walk up to Whole Foods, and they’ve got a pizza oven, they’ve got barbeque chicken, they’ve got a Thai bar—

DL: Yeah, but there’ll always be—it’s not like going out to eat.

CS: Nooo! This is just dollars, that go into food service. And that’s the only reason I bring it up, because that’s why the sector’s rising. There is a large diversity of outlets to get quality food, so the point being is that ten years ago, the quality of food in supermarkets wasn’t of great desire; wasn’t desirable. Now it is. And there are, as you know, mid-scale restaurants that used to be considered chain restaurants, and now there are mid-scale restaurants that offer food at a good price. So, we are figuring out ways to get quality food to people at moderate prices. It’s not always a sit-down, fine dining, three-hour experience.

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Last Updated {May 29, 2011}

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